Quotations by János Bolyai

Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.
[A reference to the creation of a non-euclidean geometry.]

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.
Quoted in I Kleiner, Thinking the unthinkable, Mathematics Teacher81 (7) 1988, 590.
See also a quotation of Farkas Bolyai.

One must do no violence to nature, nor model it in conformity to any blindly formed chimera.

JOC/EFR December 2013

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